Monthly Archives: December 2013

Wow! Anthropologists have discovered another one of those isolated tribes who have managed to exist contentedly all this time while hidden in plain sight. These natives apparently spend their time foraging for practical apps and promotional emails while performing their quaint folk rituals in complete ignorance of the world that matters:

This morning, the Pew Research Center social media report revealed that 73% of online adults now use some form of social networking site. It’s a large figure, and one that continues to show just how well these platforms have woven themselves into our lives. But it also reveals another, possibly more striking figure: that roughly 27% of online adults choose to live a life free of social networks. They’re online but, for the most part, they’re off the grid.

It’s important to remember that this isn’t a group composed of luddites or shut-ins but of individuals who see the social networks and, often the internet as a whole, as a set of tools rather than necessities.

I like to imagine being approached by a group of tourist Twittards, whereupon I rush toward them brandishing my poisoned arrows, taking delight in how they gasp and scurry back to safety.

Is this true, or had Chaplin fallen for his own mythology? Does a talent for comedy necessitate a tragic life? Are comedy and happiness truly incompatible? Common sense says no—there are countless comedians who have lived normal, well-adjusted lives without succumbing to depression, insanity, or suicide. So why is it so hard to think of one? It would seem that Chaplin, like the many who followed in Grimaldi’s wake, found it hard to resist the powerful narrative that set expectations for his happiness. The comedian’s split personality reveals what we ultimately believe comedy to be. Whereas in the Middle Ages fooling was seen as an expression of the cosmic absurdity of being alive, the modern world views it as a symptom of personal distress. In Grimaldi’s day, misery was the grit in the oyster that grew the pearl and gave substance to the otherwise trivial world of pantomime. Suffering ennobles, and when comedians suffer, we are more willing to see their work as flowing from the same font as the profoundest art. We want our comedians to be tortured; only then can we really laugh.

I hadn’t heard of Grimaldi until Arthur explained his choice of avatar to me. Stott is also the author of this article about Grimaldi specifically; both are fascinating and worth reading.

Let us, this December night, leave the ringOf heat, the lapping flames around the fire’s heart,Move with bodies tensed against the lightTowards the moon’s pull and the cloud’s hand.Arms of angels hold us, lend our bodiesHeight of stars and the planets’ whirl,Grant us sufficiency of light so we may enterThe twisting lanes to lost villages.So we may stare in the mirror of silent poolsBy long-deserted greens, deepen our sightOf what lies beyond the things that seemAnd make our vision clear as winterlight.

But you get what he’s saying: Hip-hop has traditionally been an unfriendly place to gay people. “Same Love” was released in 2012, but it didn’t break till this year, after Macklemore and Ryan Lewis scored their career-delivering hits, “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us.” Had it been written later, it very well could have been different. It’s been a watershed year in terms of hip-hop’s relationship to homosexuality. It’s harder and harder to make the case that “hip-hop hates me.”

Finally. It’s about damned time. Away with the fear. Down with the shame. An end to the living of a double life, worried about what would happen if the neighbors or one’s social circle were to find out. No more channeling that self-loathing into venomous aggression toward those who are brave enough to be out and proud. No more need to bear the insulting jokes, the insensitive questions, the utter indignity of having to pretend that Frank Ocean is a talented artist when all you care about is his political significance. Stop tangling yourselves up in painful knots of self-doubt and guilt! Say it loud, and say it proud: “We’re white progressives, and we love hip-hop and rap!” There’s nothing to be ashamed of anymore!

Oh, yeah, and I’m sure gay people will see this as a positive thing too.

Consider the work of writing, for example. Once upon a time, I wrote academic papers with an eye on promotion. But I also hoped — and still hope — that they might actually influence something in the world. How hard would I work on an academic paper if I knew for sure that only a few people would ever read it? What if I knew for sure that no one would ever read my work? Would I still do it? Much of what I do in life, including writing my blog posts, articles, and these pages, is driven by ego motivations that link my effort to the meaning that I hope the readers of these words will find in them. Without an audience, I would have very little motivation to work as hard as I do.

Now think about blogging. The number of blogs out there is astounding, and it seems that almost everyone has a blog or is thinking about starting one. Why are blogs so popular? Not only is it because so many people have the desire to write; after all, people wrote before blogs were invented. It is also because blogs have two features that distinguish them from other forms of writing. First, they provide the hope or the illusion that someone else will read one’s writing. After all, the moment a blogger presses the “publish” button, the blog can be consumed by anybody in the world, and with so many people connected, somebody, or at least a few people, should stumble upon the blog. Indeed, the “number of views” statistic is a highly motivating feature in the blogosphere because it lets the blogger know exactly how many people have at least seen the posting. Blogs also provide readers with the ability to leave their reactions and comments — gratifying for both the blogger, who now has a verifiable audience, and the reader-cum-writer. Most blogs have very low readership —perhaps only the blogger’s mother or best friend reads them — but even writing for one person, compared to writing for nobody, seems to be enough to compel millions of people to blog.

Of course, most of those people give up after the novelty fades, too — I just happened to see a citation claiming that 60% of blogs are inactive within four months. As for me, I’ve published over 1700 posts, most of which have only gotten a few dozen pageviews each. My most-viewed post is one from a few years ago where I included an image of a stone carving of Priapus in a post about Tiger Woods’s rampant horndoggery. Once I removed the image out of irritation with the attention, I finally stopped getting daily visits from Eastern Europeans with a weird thing for pictures of giant stone schlongs. And thus, my chance at the big time of blogging was gone…

I find the concept of the audience to be useful — envisioning even a generic reader helps keep one’s prose from getting lost in solipsist shorthand. But I still firmly believe that the dividing line between good conversation and rabble babble gets crossed very quickly; in fact, I’d probably revise that earlier estimate downward, from twenty participants to ten. People think and act differently when part of a group than they do as individuals; they raise their voice to be heard above a din and act more extreme to stand out from the crowd. Once the audience is too numerous to maintain personal relationships, things will go the way of most sites with large comment sections.

True, having even a tiny audience can provide a little extra motivation and enjoyment, but still, most of it comes from the writing itself, from the thrill of fine-tuning one’s thoughts and expressing them with even a modicum of style. When I read perspectives like Ariely’s, I can hardly believe my good fortune — it’s like I’ve discovered an ongoing free lunch buffet, or a perpetual motion machine. What makes me so odd? Why do I feel both motivated and gratified by the chance to work unobserved and live unnoticed? Long may it continue in any event.

“It’s boring almost beyond belief,” British rock critic Nik Cohn wrote of the Beatles’ self-titled album shortly after it came out in November of 1968. Cohn’s brickbat was just one of two negative reviews the New York Times published upon the release of The Beatles. (You probably know it better as the White Album.) Those responses, though, may say less about the record’s virtues than the way it upended listeners’ expectations. On 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Fab Four polished its pop instincts. The Beatles, by contrast, was scruffy and centerless, its thirty songs encompassing mock-Beach Boys vocal harmonies (“Back in the U.S.S.R.”), psychedelic folk (“Wild Honey Pie”), proto-punk (“Helter Skelter”), sound collage (“Revolution 9”), and plenty more besides.

“Everybody’s going to find something to love and hate on it,” says Indiana University music professor Glenn Gass, who has taught a course on the Beatles since 1982. “And in that way it not only summed up the history of rock and pop styles in the twentieth century but also predicted the eclectic, all-over-the-map world we’ve been living in ever since.”

As it happens, just yesterday, my chimney sweep brought me a copy of outtakes from the White Album. He says it came by way of a friend of his who used to work at Apple records. I got the impression that meant these particular versions hadn’t ever been commercially released, but I could be wrong about that.

I’ve had the guy come out to my house to clean the chimney and wood stove every winter since I’ve been living here. Upon his noticing my CD collection along one wall of the great room, we immediately bonded over a shared passion for music, and that’s what we represent to each other. Like Robert Fulghum’s barber, the quality of our relationship was partly created by a peculiar distance. We don’t interact in any other way besides the yearly maintenance visits. We don’t call, email, or hang out. We just pick up the conversation every year where we left off — what we’ve been listening to, whom we may have seen live. I usually send him on his way with lists and CD-Rs of music he hadn’t heard, so he decided to return the favor this year.

“It’s really rare,” he said that first year, “to meet somebody beyond their early twenties who still keeps up with new music.” I agreed. Oldies and classic rock stations represent living death to me, so depressing. Sure, I have sentimental favorites too, but I just can’t fathom wanting to hear nothing but. Discovering new music is one of the most invigorating joys I know of.

I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d given him the last time he was out here, so rather than burn a batch of CD-Rs for nothing, I just compiled a list of all the artists and albums I’d enjoyed this year. He grinned and said, “This is all old shit. Where’s your new stuff?” Oh-ho! I’m falling behind, am I? I do believe the gauntlet has been thrown down. Challenge accepted. Until next year, then.

As I watched the online response to Justine Sacco’s tweet, I thought of Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” first published in 1948 but quite prescient. In a village there is a ritual that has gone largely unquestioned for generations. There is a box and in the box are slips of paper. Each year, the heads of each family draw slips of paper. One will be marked and then the members of that person’s family draw slips again. Whoever selects the slip with a black mark is the sacrifice. Everyone takes up stones and sets upon the unlucky victim. Every citizen is complicit in the murder of someone who, just moments before he or she was chosen, was a friend, a neighbor, a loved one.

Justine Sacco was not sacrificed. Her life will go on. We will likely never know if she learned anything from this unfortunate affair. In truth, I don’t worry so much about her. Instead, I worry for those of us who were complicit in her spectacularly rapid fall from grace. I worry about how comfortable we were holding the stones of outrage in the palms of our hands and the price we paid for that comfort.

On the ride back home, I reflected on how awful Americans are as people–really, a disgusting collection of human beings. Whereas I literally never have interactions like that with Mexicans, this sort of thing is coin of the realm in the US; I probably had 2-3 exchanges like that per week when I lived in DC. I tried to recall the last time someone was this rude to me down here, and then I remembered that it was about 6 months ago, in the same town, and also in an incident involving a gringa. I realized that in the more than 7 years I’ve lived here, no Mexican ever cussed me out–not once; and the only such behavior I witnessed between Mexicans themselves was when I was in a taxi in Mexico City and someone cut my driver off. He leaned out the window and yelled “pendejo!,” or something like that. That was it: one time in 7 years.

Back home, I went to a supermarket to get some groceries, and as I walked by a 20-year-old Mexican woman coming from the opposite direction, I unexpectedly sneezed. “Salud!” she cried. And it was such a wake-up moment, for me: Yes, this is how people in a decent society treat strangers—not like strangers. We’re all in this together, is the feeling; your health is my concern. You can say that this is “pro forma,” but man–it counts.

…Sitting in that café, and reading about the “culture of confrontation,” I couldn’t help thinking: What was God up to, when he made the US? Did he decide to gather up all of the trash, all the human garbage from the planet, the dregs of humanity, and plunk them down in one particular country? Was this His idea of a joke, or was he trying to create an object lesson for the rest of the world: Don’t be like this!? It makes you wonder.

…I finished the New Yorker article, and felt so happy that I was not living in the US, or in that pathetic mini-gringolandia where I have my mail drop. I have no interest at all in the culture of confrontation, in a society described by the biologist David Ehrenfeld as “a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.” Let them attack each other all they want; I’m not part of that sad, destructive way of death anymore.

So, I’m just reading along, mildly amused as ever at the cane-shaking, self-parodic fury that’s become increasingly characteristic of Berman’s output. But then I come to that last line, and the faux-high-mindedness of it strikes me unexpectedly, making me snort with surprised laughter that burned my sinuses. Oh, man. Yes, rumor has it that when his noble savage Mexican friends ask him if he’d like sugar in his coffee, Morris replies, “No, thank you, I’m sweet enough!” Dude doesn’t come off as bitter and resentful at all. He’s the word made flesh, that is, if “the word” is every worn-out “get off my lawn” joke on the Internet.

The book is inspired by a lifelong fascination with the night. I grew up listening to late-night radio baseball broadcasts in Detroit. I live very close to railroad tracks, so I was always haunted by the Hank Williams-like moan of the locomotives. And then I worked in a Detroit factory all night long through my college years.

In those years, where I started sleeping two or three hours a night, getting a pattern that has continued on, eventually I discovered that I had a lot of company out there. History is full of those who love to be up all night — from the poet Sappho to Galileo, of course, working on his telescopes; Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Churchill, Obama today. So I had a lot of company with this fascination of the night.

…There’s an old English proverb: “Night gives great counsel.” It’s very reflective. It’s a contemplative part of the day. So, at the solstice, which we’re celebrating today, one could think that it’s the shortest day — there’s only 9½ hours of light. My thought on it is that, “Sure, but we have 14½ hours of darkness with which to celebrate the end of winter and the fact that life is coming back again.”

In November, the Kids’ Right to Read Project investigated three times the average number of incidents, adding to an overall rise in cases for the entire year, according to KRRP coordinator Acacia O’Connor. To date, KRRP has confronted 49 incidents in 29 states this year, a 53% increase in activity from 2012. During the second half of 2013, the project battled 31 new incidents, compared to only 14 in the same period last year.

“It has been a sprint since the beginning of the school year,” O’Connor said. “We would settle one issue and wake up the next morning to find out another book was on the chopping block.”

Unsurprisingly, they note that a lot of the challenges seemed to be motivated by reactionary opposition to race and LGBT content. Equally unsurprisingly, at least to me, is that when such opposition is progressive in nature, it’s not censorship, it’s merely speaking out, speaking your mind, making an impact through your opinion, etc.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.